Most innovation programmes start with a reasonable assumption. The problem is that the assumptions that make sense at the beginning are often the ones that break first.

In a recent episode of the EUVC Corporate Podcast, Andreas Munk Holm and Jeppe Høier spoke with Cynthia Hansen, Managing Director of the Innovation Foundation, empowered by the Adecco Group, about four lessons learned from several years of building and scaling employment solutions for people often excluded from the labour market.

The conversation was not about a framework that worked perfectly from day one. It was about what happened when the Foundation's assumptions met reality and how those lessons reshaped its approach to choosing problems, building teams, using technology and thinking about scale.

Taken together, the insights point to a broader conclusion: scale has to be designed in from the beginning.

The Foundation's early work was organised around specific demographics such as young people, women returning to work and mature workers. The logic seemed sound, but after several projects the team noticed that many of the underlying barriers repeated across different groups.

"We started to see that actually if you have enough of those intersectionalities, that's actually what tends to drop you out of the workforce or make it harder for you to get in or back in," Cynthia explained.

That insight changed how the Foundation chooses what to build. Rather than starting with a demographic and looking for a problem, the team now starts with labour market trends and then investigates who is most affected by them. The audience and geography still matter, but they come later in the process.

The Foundation's model is built around three stages: Scan, Build and Scale. Scan identifies a problem, Build develops a solution through venture-style teams and Scale focuses on expanding successful solutions.

What changed over time was not the framework itself but the assumption that every project would move through it in the same way. Some ideas required far more research. Others moved faster than expected. Cynthia realised that rigid processes were limiting learning rather than accelerating it.

As she put it, "you have to do something place-based, but always with the idea that it's going to scale."

The lesson was simple: methodology matters, but flexibility matters more.

The Foundation originally expected to build a mix of technology and non-technology solutions. Instead, project after project showed that technology was often what made a solution scalable.

Offline campaigns evolved into digital platforms. Community-based programmes needed technology layers to expand their reach. What started as a support tool increasingly became part of the solution itself.

"We saw that actually tech needed to be integrated and we should have designed it that way perhaps from the very beginning."

At the same time, Cynthia emphasised that technology cannot be separated from the realities of the people using it. Access to devices, connectivity and data remains a real constraint for many of the populations the Foundation serves. Technology matters, but only if people can actually use it.

The Foundation initially assumed it would be relatively easy to find experienced founders who wanted to work on social challenges. In reality, finding people who could operate across both venture building and social impact proved far harder than expected.

Some candidates brought startup experience but lacked social sector expertise. Others understood social impact but had never built something scalable.

"We found it very hard to find the perfect match."

That challenge led to the creation of the Foundry, a platform designed to share the Foundation's methodology while helping identify and develop future venture builders. Rather than relying solely on recruitment, the organisation increasingly focuses on building its own talent pipeline.

Looking across the four lessons, the real shift was not execution. It was assumptions.

The Foundation stopped organising around demographics and began organising around trends. It stopped treating methodology as fixed, technology as optional, and talent as something that could simply be hired once the need became obvious.

Cynthia’s point is that scale does not arrive at the end of the journey. It changes the decisions you make from the start.

What matters is whether the foundations for scale are already being built, long before scale becomes urgent.